Circle Is Now Complete, The - Dioramas

Pivotal scenes in the Star Wars saga are what Sideshow bases their Dioramas line on and usually they impress beyond expectations. The Circle Is Now Complete is a truly beautiful piece, but there are certain aspects of it that bother us a little bit and make us wish that a Sideshow fine tuned the final production piece a little bit more. Let’s face it. A figure case in polystone in approximately between one-eighth and one-tenth scale will not give you the ultimate details that a Premium Format figure can (or a 12” figure for that matter). Sideshow did do some impressive work with the Darth Vader figure in the set but Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t impress us as much. Since Hasbro has been able to knock Obi-Wan Kenobi likenesses out of the park, we were taken aback by the fact that the one included in this Diorama just didn’t make the cut. Looking a bit like his head was put in a vice, Obi-Wan Kenobi suffers from a too narrow head and limited detail of his costume simply affected by the stand of him holding a lightsaber. Darth Vader on the other hand looks fantastic and Sideshow successfully included the alternating (almost checkered) look of his helmet which includes both silver and black. There is a faint red hue his “eyes” and the helmet is shiny where it needs to glisten and dull where it needs to be more discreet. Overall the figures are pretty awesome and once you have them posed on the base you really have a marvelous screen capture of one of the most engaging scenes in the entire Star Wars saga.

This Diorama comes in seven total pieces that all separate from each other. They include Darth Vader, Darth Vader’s lightsaber blade, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber blade, base, wall, and for the exclusive collector, a nice backdrop of the interior of the Death Star complete with a portion of the Millennium Falcon. This thick, plexiglass background gives the diorama great depth and gives the overall display pieces a beautiful surrounding. If you passed on the exclusive version, you still get the cropped blast door frame but it honestly just doesn’t look the same. The base of the diorama is painted beautifully in an extremely shiny black. And tiles have been created in the floor thanks to precise scoring by the sculptors. The frame of the blast door is painted in gray color and it does help to crop the display of the Darth Vader versus Obi-Wan Kenobi lightsaber duel. But as we stated before, it does look a little bit barren without the backdrop. This unfortunately is essential for this piece. The lightsaber blades are the standard “annoying” colored plastic sticks that we are growing tired of on Sideshow Collectibles pieces. We have gone on and on about how this is not the way to due lightsaber blades. Although it would have been difficult on a piece like The Circle Is Now Complete, we think for the most part that leaving lit lightsabers out of the pieces are the most ideal way to go. Just give us these high-end collectibles with just the hilts until you can find a way to perfect the burning “white-hot” lightsaber blade. (And definitely don’t give us electronic in them either please. That just adds insult o injury if you ask us.)

This is a very expensive piece and since it contains a version of Obi-Wan Kenobi that doesn’t look perfect, we’re not sure how popular this will be for collectors of the Dioramas line. We don’t intend to cheapen the overall quality of this piece by ragging on Obi-Wan Kenobi, but we don’t know how this likeness passed by everyone. Who knows? You may be very happy with how he turned out. We are not. But despite our opinions, we acknowledge that The Circle Is Now Complete has a stunning paint job, mostly good sculpting and contains the most important element of the scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. So Sideshow Collectibles did an amazing job on creating a diorama that grabs all of the key elements of that lightaber duel scene. Perhaps it’s that space is more of an issue now than ever before which greatly affects how collectors choose what collectibles to bring into their collections. This piece is extraordinarily large and if you collect Sideshow’s other products, well, you may just be plum out of room by now. We hope that Sideshow Collectibles continue to focus on the amazing 12” Figure line at an even higher degree. That is the bread and butter of their body of work and with the incredible announcements and their change of focus to all-new body sculpts, we think the line will be bringing us things we never imagined possible. And things of that nature really just can’t compare with a polytsone diorama, no matter how well executed it was. The Circle Is Now Complete is definitely a great piece, but in the midst of all the great product out there, we’re not sure how much priority it will have on collectors’ minds.